This application makes reference to, incorporates the same herein, and claims all benefits accruing under 35 U.S.C. Section 119 from an application for MULTI-DESTINATION TRANSMISSION METHOD OF A SHORT MESSAGE FOR A MOBILE STATION filed earlier in the Korean Industrial Property Office on Jul. 12, 1999 and there duly assigned Ser. No. 28085/1999.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a mobile terminal system, and in particular to a method for simultaneously transmitting a short message to a plurality of mobile terminals at the receiving end.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, mobile terminals are mainly used for receiving a telephone service. However, with the new developments in the mobile terminal technologies, the terminals are also used for receiving other data services.
These days, a mobile terminal can transmit/receive a short message to/from another mobile terminal as well as other information, such as security information, traffic information, weather information, etc., through a short message service (SMS). The short message transmission/reception service enables different forms of short message to successfully transmit to a terminating mobile terminal even when the terminating mobile terminal line is busy. The short message service is available at a lower cost than the telephone service, thus the use of the short message service is progressively increasing.
However, according to the short message service as described above, the transmission/reception of the short message can be performed only in a point-to-point connection. Thus, in the event that a user intends to transmit the same message to a plurality of mobile terminals at the receiving end, the user must repeatedly transmit the same short message to respective terminating mobile terminals. The repeated transmission of the same short message is inefficient and causes much inconvenience to the user.
Accordingly, the present invention has been made in an effort to solve the problems occurring in the related art, and the object of the present invention is to provide a multi-destination transmission method for a mobile terminal that can simultaneously transmit the same short message to a plurality of mobile terminals at the receiving end.
In order to achieve the above object, according to the present invention, there is provided a multi-destination transmission method of a short message in a mobile terminal comprising the steps of: registering a group of telephone numbers corresponding to a plurality of mobile terminals for the multi-transmission of the short message; detecting a request for the multi-transmission of the short message after editing the short message; selecting whether to multi-transmit the short message; selecting a group selected for the multi-transmission among the groups of pre-registered telephone numbers if the multi-transmission is selected; and, multi-transmitting the short message to the plurality of the telephone numbers registered in the selected group when the request for the multi-transmission is detected.